Neeraj Chopra, the Indian athlete, made history on Saturday when he became the first Indian to win a track and field Olympic gold medal at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. He won the men’s javelin throw event.
Soon after his victory, Twitter was flooded with memes and requests for a biopic on the 23-year-old athlete. An old interview of Chopra also started doing the rounds, in which he had revealed the names of the actors he would want to play him in his biopic.
In an interview with Quint in 2018, right after he won India’s first gold medal at the Asian Games, Chopra said that he would like to see Akshay Kumar or Randeep Hooda play him. “It’ll be great if a biopic is made. The people I like are Randeep Hooda from Haryana, and Akshay Kumar in Bollywood,” he said.
After Chopra won the Olympic gold medal on Saturday, Kumar took to Twitter to congratulate him and this started off a chain of memes. Several Twitterati said that the actor had found his next biopic project.
Notably, Kumar has earlier played the role of Tapan Das, the man who won India its first gold medal in the 1948 Summer Olympics, in the 2018 film Gold.
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However, after his win on Saturday, Chopra told The Times of India that he does not want a biopic made on him just yet. “I don’t know much about it. I want to keep my full focus on my game. All this looks good once a person leaves the game. I will try to do more and get better results,” he said. “I mean there is more to my story. Let me focus on my game too.”
He further added that while an athlete is still active, no biopics should be made on their lives.
Currently, there are a couple of biopics in the works in the Hindi film industry based on the lives of Indian athletes: the Ranveer Singh-starrer 83, based on cricketer Kapil Dev who led India to a World Cup win in 1983, and Taapsee Pannu-starrer Shabaash Mithu, which is the biopic of cricketer Mithali Raj.